This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and more specifically to creating advertisements for objects maintained by a social networking system.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system provides an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services by presenting advertisements to social networking system users.
Presenting advertisements to social networking system users allows an advertiser to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade social networking system users to take an action regarding the advertiser's products or services. Many social networking systems generate revenue by displaying advertisements to their users. Frequently, social networking systems charge advertisers for each presentation of an advertisement to a social networking system user (e.g., each “impression” of the advertisement) or interaction with an advertisement by a social networking system user.
Conventional social networking systems provide an advertiser with an interface to specify information for generating one or more advertisements for presentation to social networking system users. Such an interface typically includes fields for an advertiser to provide information such as an image, a title, a body, a description, a budget, and one or more targeting criteria, to the social networking system for generating the advertisement. Optional fields may also be included in the interface, allowing an advertiser to specify additional information, such as audio data, video data, or other data, to be included in an advertisement. However, providing information to a social networking system to generate advertisements for advertisements through these interfaces often requires advertisers to expend significant resources to determine budgets and targeting criteria for advertisements and to become familiar with interfaces for providing information describing advertisements to a social networking system.